SPLEEN is the personal blog of Stephen Judd

All posts tagged "cider"

There seems to be a big push to promote cider in New Zealand recently. I see most of the breweries now have a cider line. The ones I've tried haven't been up to much. I rememember cider in the West Midlands, fearsome stuff that only hard men could drink all night, bitter and strong. This new stuff is like apple juice + alchohol. It's pleasant but inoffensive. Unlike the marketing that comes with it:

The Englishmen in the ship's boat are human. So why are they confronted with kiwis? Isn't this implying that there are no indigenous people here? The tangata whenua have been erased. Alternatively, if the birds stand for people, which people? He manu ko tahi tatou?

How have the kiwis' feathers been ruffled? Can the hurts of the colonisation of these islands be referred to in this way, or made better with cider? What kind of a gift is cider to those kiwis? One that traditionally we have regarded with ambivalence.

Finally, that captain looks like Cook. I don't know whether "frightfully" was the same kind of class signifier in the 18th century that it is now, but I doubt that son of a farm labourer ever talked like a toff.